Family Mourns Death of Teen Soccer Player

Just back from arranging to bury his son, Juan Luis Prado slipped into the youngster’s bedroom Monday morning and tried to understand how the 16-year-old soccer standout could die playing the game he loved.

Eder Prado, a junior at Channel Islands High School in Oxnard, was in excellent condition and showed no signs of illness as he played with his club team Sunday afternoon at Las Piedras Park in Santa Paula, his father said.

But seconds after complaining of leg pain and taking himself out of the game, the youngster collapsed on the field and never regained consciousness. He was wheeled away by paramedics and pronounced dead at 3:35 p.m. at Santa Paula Memorial Hospital.

Juan Prado had watched the whole thing from the sideline, wearing the red-white-and-blue jacket Eder had given him emblazoned with the name of one of the many teams on which he played in Ventura County and Mexico.

Even after learning Monday that the teenager died of natural causes--that Eder had a birth defect that slowly pinched off the flow of blood to his heart--Prado said he was still struggling to understand why any parent should have to bury his child.

“The weight of this is very heavy,” said a swollen-eyed Prado, still wearing the jacket while scanning the trophies, medals and other awards that dominate Eder’s bedroom in the family’s south Oxnard home.

“Sometimes there are no answers for these things,” he said. “It seems that God often takes the good ones first.”

It is not the first time a Ventura County youngster has collapsed during competition as a result of a previously undetected heart problem.

In late 1996, then 15-year-old Donte Nunnery of Rio Mesa High School suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed without warning during the final minute of a junior varsity basketball game at Agoura High School. He sank deep into a coma only to emerge a month later unable to talk and walk, in need of around-the-clock care. He has since recovered to the point where he is back in school as a special-education student.

And last year, 15-year-old Rosanna Porras of Fillmore collapsed at a soccer practice and died three days later at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. Medical officials determined that she was the victim of a rare and previously undetected heart condition.

“This kind of thing is very rare; one case a year is not really a big pattern,” said Armando Chavez, a forensic pathologist technician with the Ventura County medical examiner’s office.

Chavez said he called Prado on Monday afternoon to let him know how his son had died and to suggest that a doctor check his three other children to make sure they do not have the same condition.

“I think it’s good they have an answer for what happened,” Chavez said. “It allows them to move on.”

That’s easier said than done. Friends and family Monday described Eder as a standout student who excelled in math and wanted to go to college to become an architect.

And they said he was crazy about soccer, which he took up as a boy and excelled in as a teenager. He was a member of a local team that played in the Junior Olympics in Mexico two years ago.

“He was a very serious young man, a very good student and very focused on sports,” said Zeke Jaquez, a counselor at Channel Islands High, where faculty members assembled an intervention team Monday for students who wanted to talk about Eder.

“This just came as a complete surprise,” he said. “This kind of thing is not supposed to happen.”

At the family’s home Monday, friends and relatives gathered to talk about Eder. They recalled him as a straight-A student whose academic awards hung alongside plaques chronicling his soccer achievements.

And they said he was a role model for other youngsters, the kind of kid who was well-liked by others and who made his parents proud.

“We expected the maximum from him,” Juan Prado said. “And with his qualifications, he would have achieved that.”